Love and Ruin
“Looking back will only sink you,” he said, hearing my cry for the past as a complaint. “This is our life now. Are you with me, or not?” His voice was challenging and his look was, too. He was wondering if I’d run off again—but I wouldn’t. I was too close to finishing Liana, and I wasn’t going to lose traction on the book for anything or anyone. Not if I could help it.
* * *
—
I locked myself in my office, rolled up my sleeves, and plunged in for one last push to finish the novel. No travel, no articles, no lunches in town, no distractions of any variety. There was only Liana and her world, which felt dizzying and wonderful and terrifying and maddening, just like love. Three weeks later, on June 27, I wrote the words The End, and then sat looking at them, shivering and full of joy and disbelief and astonishment and gratitude. The book was really and truly done. I’d poured everything inside. Whatever happened next, I hadn’t spared anything or hedged my bets or been cowardly about a single word.
“Do you think it’s actually good?” I asked Friendless. She was sitting atop one of the books that were spread everywhere and looking at me with those eerie green eyes that were like nothing of this world.
Cats’ eyes sometimes seemed to bounce your own questions back at you, and Friendless’s eyes did that now, blinking and steadying. Do you think it’s actually good?
“Oh, God, I hope so. I do hope so, more than anything.”
I piled up the pages and rested my head on them for a moment, saying whatever prayer it is that writers have for the gifts that come from somewhere both inside and outside. And then I walked through the dark house to the pool and shed my clothes at the edge and slipped through the cool skin of the surface, plunging down and kicking hard, my mouth trailing bubbles. This too was a prayer.
65
I had long feared that Bumby would be drafted, but that wasn’t what happened. He enlisted, breaking my heart and his mother’s, no doubt. Ernest swore he had no fear for Bum, and that he was proud of him, but I couldn’t see how when he could be taken just like that, and his courage with him, and his fine heart.
“Try not to worry so much,” Ernest told me. “Nothing will happen to him at Fort Riley, and maybe by the time he goes over, the worst will have come and gone already.”
“I hope to God you’re right,” I said, and wrote to Bum in his officer’s training facility in Kansas telling him that I was sending two angels to watch over him, one for each of his beautiful shoulders. He might not feel them at all, for they were very light-footed angels, but they would be with him always and bring him home. And when he did come back, we would walk under the fruit trees at the Finca and talk about everything, just like we always had, because there was nothing better than talking with a good friend.
I posted the letter and then, to keep from fretting, tried to get the house ready for Ernest’s forty-fourth birthday, and myself as well. I had let my hair go something awful and my body, too. I began to watch my weight again, bronzing myself from head to toe and slathering myself with lotions and creams and unguents.
It was right in the midst of all this preening and priming that I heard from Charles Colebaugh at Collier’s. The Allies had begun bombing Rome and were hoping for a surrender from Italy. There was also a whisper that we would invade France soon.
I was intrigued, and full of questions. “I thought there was a sanction against women at the front,” I told Colebaugh.
“That’s still true. You wouldn’t have formal military accreditation. But if you launched at England first, then made your way to Italy and France, we know you’d find good stories. You always do. We can stake you three months of expenses.”
After we rang off, I stood there a long time, looking at the phone and feeling powerfully moved by Colebaugh’s faith in me. This war was the most terrifying thing the world had ever seen. Who knew how any of us would survive it? Who knew what to do at all except cling tightly to those we loved, and hope? But there was something else, too. I could write about it. Collier’s had an audience of ten million readers now, and they could all see what I saw if I gathered the nerve to plunge over. This was a rare chance. How could I not take it?
* * *
—
When Ernest finally arrived home, he had a coal-black beard, and a singed nose that was peeling. I folded him up in my arms and kissed him a dozen times, and then took him to bed. For two solid days, we only left the bedroom to go to the pool, and only left the pool to crawl to our deck chairs. We sat in our robes, squeaky clean and bleached by the sun, and sober. The cats sprawled beside us, lanky and at ease. Boise with his purr that was entirely silent. Friendless on her back, flicking her tail.
“I wish it was always this easy,” I said.
“It’s easy enough right now, isn’t it?”
The light was behind the trees, making them look cut out—carved painstakingly and leaned very gently against the sky. I looked and looked at them, thinking. Would I be as thrilled by the idea of going off to war if I didn’t have Ernest and the Finca waiting for me? And would I be truly content here if I couldn’t also go away sometimes and do my work? The questions hung there for only a moment, their answers obvious. I didn’t want to lose anything I had. I also didn’t know how to move forward without risking everything.
“I never want us to be so married that we can’t be ourselves anymore,” I said.
“All right.” I heard a thread of caution in his voice. He likely smelled my dilemma, even if it wasn’t my intention to share it. “What would you have instead?”
“Instead of being polite and awfully safe, you mean?”
“Yes.”
“Just for there to be room to be as wild and free as we actually are, and to be able to really talk to each other. That’s what I miss when you’re away. You’ve always been my favorite person to talk to.”
“That’s nice.”
“It is. It is nice, Rabbit, but I have these other sides of me, too, and I’m not always sure how they fit together or even if they can. I want to be passionate about things and feed my mind and travel the world. I’d rather be darkly and dangerously happy, like living on a knife’s edge, than lose my way and forget my nature.”
He’d been watching me seriously as I talked. Now he said, “This is why you’ve never agreed to have a child.” It wasn’t a question but a statement, and it was laced all over with sadness rather than bite or malice.
“I do love children. I love yours terribly. I don’t know. Maybe we should have done it ages ago, as soon as we were married or even before. It just seems like the window has passed.”
“I know. I feel it, too. Only it seems awfully unfair when I think of it. Men can long for a child but not do anything about it. The woman always has the final say. And if that’s no, then no is what you have to live with.”
There was a stillness and a matter-of-factness to his words that gave me a sick feeling. “I’m sorry,” I said, because I didn’t know what else to say. And then I said the truest thing I knew. “I love you.”
* * *
—
We’d bought a hog from a neighboring farmer for Ernest’s birthday and set out to roast it, hosting a feast for all our friends with enough liquor on hand for several times their number. The house and grounds were as beautiful as they’d ever been, and everything went smoothly, and the food was sublime. Ernest gave several speeches, and Gregorio, Ernest’s first mate, recited part of a poem and caught everyone off guard, and the pelota players sang and played beautifully, and everyone got slightly drunk and then very drunk, and then roaring drunk.
It wasn’t the drinking that troubled me and made me feel a little apart from the events of the evening. It wasn’t that the Basques had started to throw silverware and then hard rolls at one another at the table. It wasn’t even that I couldn’t hear myself think for all the noise and chaos. It was a song that un
did me. A favorite of mine that I’d heard countless times by now, “Txoria Txori,” about a man who loves a bird that has flown away.
“If I had clipped its wings, it would have been mine,” the lyrics went, “it would have never flown away.” The song had always struck me as wistful and a little romantic, about the difficult lessons of love. But as Felix sang it tonight, his voice high and clear and plaintive, I heard something new in the song. It was just as much about the bird, I realized, as the man. When she flies, it’s not because she’s cruel or cannot love the man, or because she loves another, or for any other reason, really, except that she’s a bird. She is what she does.
I tried to meet Ernest’s eyes when the song was over. I wanted to tell him about Europe now—now—before I’d lost my nerve, and while I still felt the song as a beautifully clear blazing of wisdom. Listen, I wanted to say, when you fell in love with me you must also have been in love with my wings. Love them now. Love me. Love me, and let me go.
66
I hadn’t seen London in five years and couldn’t help staring in disbelief by how changed it was. Over a million houses had been damaged or destroyed in the Blitz, and many of the most familiar landmarks had been bombed to unrecognizability, so that the entire skyline seemed altered. Perhaps it always would be. Every other person on the street was in uniform. Nurses walked in pairs with the crimson lining of their wool capes flaring and billowing around them. The berets of the boys from the parachute regiment were redder still. Clean shaven and beautiful, they stood out in a sea of American GIs who were everywhere, everywhere, awaiting orders for the invasion of France, which was still months away, though no one knew how far. It was a whispered plan, a wish, a dream—the thing that would turn the tide in this war. If only it would finally come.
I took a room at the Dorchester, which reminded me so much of my room in Spain I felt instantly at home there—with the same slightly faded cretonne curtains and fabric on the chairs; the same pinging radiator and tiny bathroom sink. Ginny Cowles had a room at the Dorchester, too, as did many of the correspondents I’d known in Madrid and later in Czechoslovakia and Finland. I felt heartened by that and comforted—as if we were all still a kind of fraternity or even a family. I’d missed that dearly.
* * *
—
I know you don’t understand why I have to be here, I wrote Ernest, but please don’t give up on me. You belong to me and I belong to you. Don’t ever doubt that, or that I love you.
* * *
—
Loving me from London isn’t exactly the most satisfying option I can think of, he wrote back. Come home quickly, Rabbit. I know I haven’t shown you much lately, but I admire your courage and your mind and your heart more than anything I ever saw, and please be careful when you’re over there because I couldn’t rightly stand it nor find a way to go on without you. Without you, please understand, is no longer any kind of life for me. Already it feels like sadness and loneliness have their grip on me and I wonder how these weeks and weeks will go. The cotsies have called a powwow and are watching me, worried. They send you love and say, as I do, come home.
* * *
—
I read his letter over and over until I’d memorized it. The tenderness in his words made my heart hurt, and so did thinking of him there alone with the cats, feeling lost. He was trying his best to let me do what I needed to do. I saw the effort and wanted to reach across the ocean between us to hold him, and to tell him that without him was also no way of life. No way at all.
Maybe distance was sharpening something for us both. I hoped so, as I waited for my official correspondent tags and my first assignment. When they came, I headed to an airfield in the country, at Woodhall Spa, in Lincolnshire. The British Lancasters, which were among the heaviest bombers in the war, flew in and out of the airfield a dozen at a time, the air so full of vibration when they did you’d think you were going to shake apart or go a little mad. I watched them buzz away in their lethal black formation, and then watched them come back again after dropping their cargo and in the meantime took loads of notes about the base. There was one small country hotel where the pilots who waited for their next mission drank vats of milky tea and read borrowed dime-store novels in long wooly cardigans and slippers by the smoking woodstove. I saw a story in that, the way they seemed like anyone anywhere, staying warm, biding their time before the signal came. Then they suited up, climbing into those great hulking terrible birds to bring death on the wing.
I started writing about “the bomber boys,” as I’d begun to call them in my head, on my way back to London, but along the way caught an awful cold that stuck and stuck, becoming the flu, and then gastritis, all of that at once. I couldn’t keep my fever down, nor eat a bite, and felt like some sort of dying animal. Even worse, Ernest’s letters had stopped coming.
I knew he wasn’t at sea, with his crew, since his mission had been held up indefinitely. His silence was all the more troubling, too, because he’d reached out so lovingly just a week ago. Had he fallen lower at home, and turned to drinking himself sick at the Floridita and the Frontón? Had he slid further away from me, to where I couldn’t reach him? It was maddening, and made me feel helpless. I knew my being gone for so long must be chinking away at him, but I couldn’t see his eyes and talk to him about it. I couldn’t pull him back toward me and tell him I was his own, and always would be, no matter where I’d gone in my travels. I couldn’t really do anything but worry, sick and thickheaded, and wait for some news. And hope it was the good kind, and that we would be okay.
67
The trick when things got bad, he knew, was to be very still, first in his body and then in his mind. If he lay still enough, long enough, he could drop down and down until he found that pocket of quiet inside himself. It was always there, the quiet place, but you couldn’t always reach it.
The flooring they’d put in the house was woven matting good for this climate, and also good, it turned out, for the cats and for him, too. There was furniture everywhere in the room, comfortable furniture you could sink into, but nothing felt right until he lay on the floor, and put his legs against the armchair, and pulled the lamp over until the light formed a soft circle just off his shoulder. The matting was stiff, but that was all right. He put a blanket down on top of it as if he were camping, and then pulled a pillow off the sofa and he had a fine place.
In a few moments, Friendless swayed, walking over to him, then settled against his right side, at his waist, just under his arm where he held his newspaper up to the circle of light. Boise wouldn’t have anything but the best spot, in the center of his chest, and he curled there with his warm weight and a stillness that always felt like love to Ernest. In the same way that fish had quickness, cats had a way of being still. That was their gift, and you could learn a lot by watching them get there. If you lay close with them, and matched your breathing with theirs, you sometimes thought you had a great and very rare secret.
He hadn’t always understood the thing about cats. He hadn’t always understood himself, either. When he was young, it had often seemed as if nearly anything could finish him off. He felt too much. That was the truth of it. He noticed too many things in people’s eyes, so that even a meal with his family could make him feel split open and exposed. His parents soon guessed how it was for him because he’d not learned to hide it yet, but they couldn’t help him. No one could help him until he began to learn how to seal over the wounded, flinching place inside and feel an almost surgical relief. It had taken time to learn, and a lot of concentration.
The first time he had known he could do it and count on the method to carry him through was after Agnes’s letter had come, the one saying it was all over and that she’d been wrong to lead him on. They were supposed to be married and he’d believed her. He’d told his friends and his mother and he didn’t think he could bear trying to explain that it was all a mistake, or worse. He hadn’t tho
ught he could live through losing her, but he had. Later, he would know how much more there was to lose, and just how deep love could go, and how it could shred you and everything you thought you understood about life. When you loved two people and were terrified, knowing you could lose them both at any moment and have nothing. Or when you loved one person too much and couldn’t be sure who you were anymore without her. That’s when you would need every trick you’d learned, and more.
Now the wind was picking up outside. He didn’t have to go to the window to see how it would be coming from the west, blowing the trees and rocking their branches. In the lane that led up to the house, and out behind the pool where the jungle grew up thick and tall, everything would be shifting now, back and forth like dark water. But Boise had his own rhythm and wasn’t troubled. If the cat felt the wind, he didn’t show it. He only grew heavier and more himself, as if he was falling more deeply into his bones. Surrendering to the way things actually were. Ernest registered all of this against his chest and began to make the necessary adjustments, slowing his breath, feeling the rise and fall of his chest and belly beneath the cat until he felt heavier, too, against the blanket and the matting, everything below him and all around.
He reached for his glass, and held the whiskey in his mouth for a long time, letting it burn him in a good way. And then, when he knew he had gotten to a place that was very quiet indeed, and very still, he made the final adjustment. The warmth and gravity of the cat’s body sank into him and through him. And that’s when he knew he was strong enough, and quiet enough, to let himself feel that Marty was really gone. He wouldn’t get her back because he’d pushed her away. Something had broken between them, or was it him who’d done the breaking?